Aaron Judge's Chase for .400
The Yankees captain is on a quest to accomplish a feat Baseball hasn't seen since 1941
On Sunday, Aaron Judge went 2-3 with a double in the Yankees 11-5 victory over the Athletics in Sacramento. This marked the 40th game of the season for both the Yankees and Judge. What may seem like an arbitrary game number is significant in that signals 25% of the MLB season is in the books.1 Judge is having one of the most incredible starts in baseball history. He ended Sunday with an astronomical .409 batting average leading all of baseball, 0.060 points higher than teammate Paul Goldschmidt. It also made him just the fourth qualified batter to post a .409 batting average or better in their first 40 games over the past 30 seasons, joining Manny Ramirez (.412 in 2001), Chipper Jones (.410 in 2001), and Larry Walker (.410 in 1997).2
Dating back to 2000, there have been 98 qualified players to start the season with a .350 average or better and gone on to finish the season with the qualified number of plate appearances to appear in official records. Only five have hit over .400 in their team’s first 40 games, and just two higher than Judge’s .409.
2024 Hall of Fame Inductee Todd Helton finished with the best average of the crop with a .372 mark after starting off .407.3
This strong start is not exactly common for Judge, who typically starts out slow and gains steam as the season progresses. Even in his epic MVP campaign last year, Judge hit just .233 through the Yankees first 40 games. The slugger followed up that lackluster start by hitting .354 the rest of the way, playing in 119 more games. This bucked a trend for Judge, who for the first time in his career hit for a higher average in the latter three-quarters of the season than in the first quarter.
Chasing Williams
Ted Williams is famously the last player to hit over .400, posting a .406 average in 1941. Shockingly, Williams didn’t even win the MVP in that year, finishing second behind rival Yankee Joe DiMaggio.4 However, posting a near-.400 batting average to start doesn’t guarantee one will continue to hit with such consistency through the full season. Batters who hit this well to start tend to see some serious regression.
Based on 21st-century trends of hitters who post at least a .350 average through their team’s first 40 games, Judge projects to finish the year with a .339 batting average. Still nothing to scoff at, as it would rank as the 7th-best average in the last ten non-2020 seasons! We can, however, get a bit more statistical with this (if you’re in to that sort of thing). I ran a multiple linear regression model using underlying hitting statistics—Exit Velocity, Launch Angle, Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP), and Hard Hit %—along with current Batting Average, to predict final batting average for qualified hitters at this point in the season (through May 12th) from 2018 to 2024. The model was statistically significant and yielded a Average Error of 1.08e-16, Mean Absolute Error of 0.017, and Mean Absolute Percentage Error of 6.6% on test data. This model forecasts Judge to hit .320 when all is said and done, with the 95% confidence interval extending from .277 to .362. You can see batting average projections for all currently qualified batters below.
So will Judge hit .400? The odds are slim. Honestly, given the way baseball has changed offensively I don’t have much confidence we will ever see a .400 hitter again. However, this should not take away any from what Aaron Judge has been able to do this year, especially if he continues to tear through this season in a similar fashion. Judge is truly building a case to become the best right-handed hitter in baseball history.
In a 162 game season the the exact quarter-way point would be the middle of the fifth inning in game 41, but lets not get too caught up in technicalities here.
Stathead | Baseball Reference (2020 excluded)
Helton also had the advantage of playing half of his games at the batter-friendly Coors Field, 5,280 feet above sea-level.
Good post Sean. Unlikely as you note that anyone will finish at .400 or better. But if it were to happen my guess is that it would be someone with close to the bare minimum in Plate Appearances (503) who was injured or unable to play for a month (or so) of the season.